Page 31 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Chapter Thirteen

N ight in Harrowgate did not so much fall as gather. It descended on the long gallery like a fog settling in the hollows of the stairs. Isabella’s candle made a small, stubborn light the shadows tolerated but did not welcome.

In her chamber, the fire had burned low and small. In the corner, Papa’s trunk crouched, waiting, always waiting. The key lay against her throat, a paltry weight that made its presence known, nonetheless.

Setting down the candle, she stood a moment, listening. Somewhere in the walls, pipes ticked. And all around her, the whispers hovered like moth’s wings.

She looked to the brass-bound trunk and silently acknowledged why she had skirted it for so long, not for the lock but for the dangers of what might be found within.

The contents of that trunk had swallowed Papa whole.

If she opened it, might it take her too?

That fear had kept her circling like a moth at a candle.

She straightened, decided. She would not be ruled by a box or by the terror of the unknown.

She had dared to unlock Rhys’s secrets. How could she do less with her own?

Taking the key from around her neck, she knelt and fitted it in the lock.

The wards turned. When she lifted the lid, the trunk exhaled a breath tinged with dust and old paper.

Inside were oilskin bundles, neatly stacked.

She thought back to how distraught Papa had been, sitting on the floor before the trunk, books and folios strewn around him.

Even in his despair, he had packed everything away with care.

She drew out the first packet. Papa’s tidy hand marched down the folios between marginal notes that cut across with urgency.

On Methods for Quelling Unquiet . Dates.

Parish names. A curious symbol repeated in the margins: two semicircles, nested but not touching.

She brushed it with a fingertip and felt a faint prickle on her skin.

She remembered seeing it before, remembered Papa hiding it with his hand.

Another bundle held clippings from journals and newspapers—accounts of apparitions, cautions against spirit-rapping—and a leaflet from a lecture on “manifestations.”

“Papa,” she said softly, confused. He had always viewed such things with a jaundiced eye. Why harbor such a collection, then?

She withdrew more packets, unwrapped them to find more books, some of which she had seen before. Petit Albert . Dragon Rouge . Grimorium Verum . Some were journals rather than tomes, diaries of spells and conjuration.

At the bottom of the trunk lay a book that had once been whole and now was not.

The binding had been cleft clean down its spine, so that she held one board and half the gatherings while the other half either lived elsewhere or had been destroyed.

The surviving leather was worn and scuffed.

The vellum leaves clung desperately to tattered cords.

One showed a sketch of a room…lamps, a bowl, what appeared to be the chalked outline of a door on a stone hearth, and notes in the margins, old and faded.

Leafing onward, she found diagrams and more notes, circles within circles, and adjacent notations crossed out, only to be made again. At the torn gutter, the lines broke off, a paragraph snuffed, sentences missing half their clauses.

Someone, not Papa, had written in a small, cramped hand: Two halves…willing…joined…living conductor required. The words made no sense to her, but the rest was missing.

Tucked in was a single leaf in Papa’s hand, Quelling the Unquiet written across the top.

Beneath it was a terse litany: Bar the chimneys with iron.

Mark lintels with chalk. Salt the thresholds.

Keep rowan at the hearth. Name nothing you do not mean to bind.

In the margin, he had added, smaller: I have tried each.

Some held for a night, some only an hour. Not enough. Never enough.

In another place, a single line caught her eye, the ink faint as though Papa’s pen had been nearly spent was the note: Sensitives anchor the aperture.

Without the anchor, the chorus shards into harm.

And further down the page: A gate to continuity, to let the trapped end the endless circle. Cost unknown.

Those final two words chilled her.

And at the very bottom Papa had written, For Isa. When she is ready. He had struck out if and replaced it with when . That small correction, that quiet certainty, made her heart knot with grief.

Her eyes stung and the note blurred. In the press of Papa’s script, ink blotched where his hand had paused, margins crowded where there had been little room, she saw what she had missed before. In those final weeks, he had known his time was short and he had hurried, not for himself but for her.

He had not thought her mad.

Iron and chalk. Rowan and salt. Everything he had tried was not a cure for delusion but a defense against what was real. He had believed her all along. He had believed in the things that breathed at the edges of her sight, and he had worked to banish them.

What Papa had feared were those who would not believe, the pity and censure and remedies and pain they would force upon a girl who spoke of voices and wraiths.

Suddenly, she understood that fraught breakfast the morning Papa had chased Rhys away, the way he had asked if he had made a mistake, if he had been wrong.

Not wrong about her, not wrong about what she heard and saw, but wrong to keep this knowledge shut inside a box and ask her to pretend nothing moved in the shadows. Wrong to think silence would save her.

Never say it. Never show it.

His admonition took on new meaning. Never let others know what she truly saw because they would not believe, and she would pay a terrible price.

But Papa had believed.

He had meant to understand it and then teach her, but he had run out of hours.

Rhys had not lit the fire. Cold made a clearer edge for his thoughts.

The lamp drew a narrow circle across the desk.

Beyond it, the paneled walls gleamed dully.

The shelves of his study were lined not with books but with ledgers, almanacs, and neat piles of correspondence tied with twine, an archive of obligations, not curiosities.

He had written a single line and blotted it twice before setting down the pen. The page accused him with its emptiness.

“Mr. Caradoc.” He looked up to see Mrs. Abernathy lingering at the threshold. “You sent Matty to fetch me.”

“I did. Please come in.”

She stepped in, shut the door softly, and waited with her hands folded against her apron. She wore her reserve like armor, her quiet a presence as commanding as any spoken word.

“I understand you’ve asked Miss Barrett to accompany you to the village,” he said. His voice came too flat, too formal, and he despised the stiffness in it. But better to protect himself with cold formality than to hazard warmth and have it turned against him.

“I have. She’s not taken so much as a half day since she’s been here, and I reckoned a turn in the village might do her good.”

The woman’s practicality had always been her armor, as his silence was his. He let the quiet stretch until it bit, then forced the words out. “I have a request to make.”

Mrs. Abernathy’s eyes widened, but she stayed silent, waiting for him to speak.

“I want her to hear the truth,” he said.

The syllables felt like a stone dragged up his throat.

“Not from me. From others. From those who remember what this house was, what this family was, and what was lost here. The fire. The deaths that came before it. The whispers people still trade across the green.” He kept his gaze fixed on the lamplight haloing the blotter.

To name the fire aloud was to peel back his own armor, to lay bare the raw wound of memory.

“The sexton. Widow Pritchard. The ferryman…” he said, thinking aloud.

And then, “No. The Burns sisters would be best.”

“Pansy likes to tell a good tale,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “And she doesn’t always stick to truth.”

“Viola will rein her in,” he said.

“I could speak with Miss Barrett…” Miss Abernathy offered.

She could. But she was loyal to him and she might gentle the telling because of it.

No. Isabella must hear versions of events in other voices, voices not his own or those obligated to him. Soon, he must ask her to make a choice. She had a right to hear the variations of truth that would come from the mouths of others.

“The sisters,” he said, decided now. “She has met them before. And she will be welcomed. I want open doors and willing mouths. But it must not smell of design.” His hands curled on the desk.

“If she hears it from me, she will take it for manipulation. If she hears it from you, she might wonder why you suddenly gossip when it is not in your character. The Burns sisters will do.”

Mrs. Abernathy’s gaze stayed steady. “Of course, sir.”

The lamp guttered, flame bowing, then righting itself. He imagined the questions tumbling through Mrs. Abernathy’s thoughts. In the end, she asked none of them because it was not her place and because she surely knew that he had already sacrificed much, asking for her help at all.

He met her eyes and held them. “I trust you with this.” The word twisted in him, bitter as gall. He did not trust. Not since betrayal and fire and ash had taken everything. And he would not tell her why this mattered; the ghosts were his burden alone.

Her face softened by a hair’s breadth. “I’ll see it done, sir. The Burns sisters are always at their window, eager for visitors. She’ll not miss them.”

He should have dismissed her then. Instead, he found himself saying, low and unfamiliar, “You think me a good man.”

“You’ve been good to me.” Mrs. Abernathy tilted her head, studied him a moment. “And I think you’ve borne more than most could and not soured past repair.”

“Thank you,” he said, and the words cost him.